Continental Divide

Lawrence Martin, the journalist and author of The Presidents and the Prime Ministers, claims that, “If you have a high level of communication, that spirit gets channelled down through the system and [the countries] work in a more co-operative vein.” This may have been truer when we were more deferential to our leaders; today there is a lot less latitude for prime ministers and presidents to co-operate if it means ignoring or opposing the values and perspectives of the coalition of voters that put them in power. At any rate, Michael Kergin, the Canadian ambassador to the U.S., has recently stated that he does not believe that much will change whether Paul Martin succeeds at fostering a better relationship with George Bush or not. “The U.S.-Canadian relationship is too important to be affected by any one person,” Kergin says.

Under Martin’s watch, Ottawa-Washington relations already seem better lubricated: the U.S. administration says that Canadian firms can now bid on projects to rebuild Iraq, and has also agreed to consult Canadian officials when American authorities seek to deport a suspected terrorist with a Canadian passport to a third country.

The second area in which Mr. Martin could make conciliatory gestures toward the United States is in the two countries’ quotidian interactions – legal, economic, political, and socio-cultural. Much of the Canada-U.S. relationship is constituted of the kind of workaday exchanges that have little or no symbolic meaning to most Canadians (or Americans for that matter). As last year’s spectacular blackout reminded us (or informed us for the first time), we share some important infrastructure with the United States. We also share a tremendous amount of unproblematic trade (about $1.4 billion per day): softwood lumber and beef cattle are exceptions to the rule. We co-operate on plenty of mundane issues of law enforcement. Many of our shared projects in this domain have nothing to do with the symbolically charged war on terror. Canadian separateness and sovereignty do not hang in the balance at every turn in these quotidian negotiations.

Despite much hand-wringing north of the border (particularly from the Left), my research suggests that economic integration has done very little to erode Canadian values. On the contrary, our values are increasingly diverging from American social values. In my recent book Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada, and the Myth of Converging Values, I document the growing gap. In surveys my firm conducted among representative samples of Americans and Canadians aged fifteen or over in 1992, 1996, and 2000, we found Americans much more likely to embrace the social-conservative agenda, including religiosity and patriarchy. Canadians, on the other hand, are more likely to espouse the core values of social liberalism, including a questioning of traditional religious authority and a rejection of patriarchy. Although our surveys in the United States were performed only at the four-year intervals noted above, our surveys in Canada were undertaken annually; Canadian social change in the 1992–2000 period was relatively steady. The adoption of nafta, in 1994, had no obvious effect on social values north of the border.

This observation is not intended as a call for complacency. There is no question that sharing a very long border with the world’s only superpower, whose wealth, military might, and population dwarf our own, poses unique challenges to our sovereignty. But when John Turner’s admen warned us in the 1988 general election that the Canada-U.S. free-trade deal would in effect eliminate the border, destroy our beloved public health-care system, and obliterate any semblance of Canadian sovereignty, they were simply wrong.

Public-opinion polls show that the majority of Canadians still believe that our country’s values and lifestyles are converging with those of Americans. My research shows quite the opposite. Why the discrepancy? Whereas public-opinion polls focus on the pulse of a constituency, document what people think is happening, or what they believe should happen in the world of public affairs, my surveys measure what people admit to be their own personal values: the mental postures that guide them through their everyday pursuits. Canadians are, of course, free to imagine what they like about the Canada-U.S. relationship, but I would contend that those who claim Canadians are becoming more like Americans are simply mistaken.

The third prong of Martin’s scheme for Canada-U.S. relations must involve the protection of those policies that are most closely linked to our essential values. It is one thing to bend in a trade dispute, or even beef up border controls to satisfy Tom Ridge and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Certainly, there are principles at stake in these areas, and no one likes to be bullied. But if Martin is wise, he will shore up favour with his American counterparts, so that he can underscore Canadian sovereignty in policy areas that are inextricably linked to distinct Canadian social values.

Two areas of particular divergence between Canada and the United States in terms of social values are patriarchy and religiosity. More than two in five Americans say they go to church weekly, compared to less than one in five north of the border. Two-thirds of Americans say religion is important to them, compared with one third of Canadians. More than thirty percent of Americans claim to believe that the words of the Christian Bible are literally true, while only fifteen percent of Canadians agree.

Canadians also have more confidence in their ability to make moral decisions without deferring to religious authority. The Pew Research Center, based in Washington, D.C., recently released a report which revealed that fifty-eight percent of Americans hold that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral. The number of Canadians who draw an ineluctable link between God and morality amounts to only thirty percent. These results are particularly interesting because they reveal that most Americans not only rely on religion as a framework for understanding personal experience, but also depend on religious concepts and ideas to ground their immediate reactions to events.

The data I’ve collected reveal a high correlation between patriarchy and religiosity. The devoutly religious – and the devoutly Christian in particular – are much more likely to agree with the statement “the father of the family must be master in his own house.” Consistent with their stronger religiosity, Americans are more than twice as likely as Canadians to hold such convictions: nearly half of Americans say they believe that the father must be the master of the house, as compared with fewer than two in ten Canadians. In America, support for patriarchy is increasing steadily (it rose seven percent during the 1990s) while in Canada it is declining just as steadily. Even in Quebec – staunchly Roman Catholic not so very long ago – weekly church attendance is now actually lower than in the rest of Canada. And declining support for patriarchy there has accompanied the exodus from the pews: barely one in seven Quebeckers still thinks dad must be king of the domestic castle.